I am officially a Blackberry user (again!)

I had a Blackberry in 2001.  It was a 850 model and I used it with the Skytel service while I was a student at University of Texas at Austin.  Skytel had recently been bought by Earthlink although that didn’t affect the service all too much.  It was about $50/month for unlimited transfer.  Since that time, prices have gone nothing but up – which is something I really can’t understand nor explain.  Cingular Wireless has an unlimited data transfer plan for use with the current generation of Blackberries that is $70/month.   Hmmmm.

A few months ago I was on eBay looking for Blackberries and found some that were Unlocked and running about $200.  The model I was aiming for was a Blackberry 7290.  At the time I wasn’t in the US (was still in India) but I put down a note reminding myself to go ahead and purchase one there to bring back for use in India.  (Blackberry 7290’s go for INR 25000 which is $568 on a 1:44 exchange rate.)

Last month I bought two of them and brought them back to India on my recent return.   Problem was – they were not unlocked. I was particularly upset since the seller explicitly marked a feature on the listing as Unlocked and I had been searching accordingly.

I managed to get one of them unlocked by calling Cingular (which was the network the Blackberries were locked to) and expressing to them that I am a Cingular customer but need the phone to work in other parts of the world too (as I do extensive traveling).  They took down the IMEI number of the Blackberry and said they would e-mail me the unlock code which I could use to unlock the Blackberry with.  They eventually got back to me and I used the following guide to get it unlocked:

http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=916002

Great – one phone done.  Another to go.  On this one, I couldn’t pull the same trick of calling Cingular Wireless customer care so I needed to try another route.

Fortunately, there are these neat remote unlocking services out there.  One in particular is the aptly-called Unlock-Blackberry.com – they charge $26 to unlock a Blackberry remotely.  You must download their software, connect your Blackberry with the standard USB cable and then run the software.  The software then connects to their server with the IMEI of the connected Blackberry and then spits back the Unlock Code.

I contacted the eBay Seller expressing my disappointment about the mis-described listing (especially after putting good feedback in the eBay system) and suggested that he refund $26 so that I could just pay for the Unlocking service on one.  He agreed and a day or two later, I managed to unlock the second Blackberry.

Airtel is the authorized Blackberry service provider in India – they have an exclusive contract with Blackberry for 3 years starting 2005.  I recently signed up with the service which is about INR 899/month for unlimited data transfer and Free International Roaming.  This works out to about $20.50/month which is a very decent rate to be paying.  Good stuff!

(I can see myself turning into a Crackberry Addict…)